The Bane of Communicating Succinctly

You may have noticed I have not blogged for a while. And if you do follow me on twitter you’ll note that my tweet rate has also dropped.

Ever increasingly, I find the need to share some ideas, but the ideas cannot be succinctly communicated in a pithy sentence or two. I have a lot of what I consider to be “dangerous” ideas (in the vein of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas), and I think it is imperative to be clear about the ideas.

And so I would sit down and write a blog post about it, only for it to derail into some mega long essay that is at best reads like mindless rambling (for example, see my previous post). It is in these cases that I sometimes feel I’m better off not writing. But sometimes I get passionate about a topic, and start writing a lot

Then midway through, I’d lose steam. Here are the example of titles that I have in my archive that went nowhere:

  • Why Do Ceramics Heat Up in Microwave Ovens (3997 words and I lost steam) – this article began life exactly a year ago today
  • Making Friends – A Rant (1301 words, and still incomplete, as I’m still gathering data, though I’m quite sure I’ll lose steam on that too)
  • Scrambled Eggs, The Guide (1514 words, lost steam already)
  • Logarithmic (A musing on non linear progression of things)
  • Track (A musing on being on track for a plan, and why sometimes it’s ok to let go)
  • Graveyard of Sideprojects (originally written when there was a craze over having side projects. I have 200+ side projects that I have not touched for years)
  • The Virtuous Molecule (a blog post about the fallacies of natural products)
  • Reviews: I have 3 book reviews, 2 movie reviews in my drafts, and they are nowhere

I have since concluded that it’s the length that makes me lose steam.

Yesterday I read Evan Miller’s Four Days of Go. The takeaway is that I wish I could write like him. I actually felt envious that he was able to get his point across straight, and still not be dry.

I have a problem with communicating succinctly. I look at all the work emails that I sent out – most explanation type emails have graphs, definitions and all sorts of background things. Even when I highlight the key takeaway points, written in normal English, sometimes they are missed.

…[P]erfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove

So says the oft-quoted Antoine de Saint Exupery.

The problem is I don’t know what to take away. I don’t know what to remove. The typical advice of how to improve writing is to “write more”. I’ve written this blog for more than 10 years in one form or another. I actually need to know how to improve, not just write more.

Argh.

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